John Oliver’s Charlie Kirk Rant Was Stunning In The Worst Possible Way

HBO host John Oliver’s brief rant about slain activist Charlie Kirk in the midst of President Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech was stunning for all the wrong reasons.

The aftermath of the stunning Kirk killing has prompted what observers on all sides see as an assault on free speech. Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi has drawn criticism for threatening to go after people over “hate speech” — including mockery or celebration of Kirk’s assassination — and Trump blurted out an escalating series essentially warning that criticizing him is now “illegal.”

That assault escalated last week as late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended under intimidation from Trump and FCC chief Brendan Carr, and Trump announced he is designating Antifa a “terrorist organization.”

Kimmel was singled out for a comment he made during a monologue on last Monday’s edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live!:

That announcement wasn’t the first scalp taken by Trump and his allies following the killing. Then-MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he jumped right in with both feet to condemn Kirk even before everyone knew he was dead

Now-former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah was one of the first of many to be fired or otherwise punished over comments related to the killing, egged on by Trump-world.

But ABC announced this Monday that Kimmel’s show will return Tuesday night, although major affiliate owners Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group have said they will not air the show.

On this week’s edition of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, Oliver devoted most of his show to Kimmel and Carr and the threat their assault on Kimmel represents to free speech. This was before Kimmel’s return was announced.

But very little of Oliver’s commentary — which was taped before the Kirk memorial and aired the night of it — actually had anything to do with Kirk. Oliver explained why during the minute-and-change he spent on the slain activist:

JOHN OLIVER: Kimmel is now one of many who faced consequences for comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder 11 days ago, with workers being fired or placed on leave over posts about him.

And very quickly, I was honestly inclined to wait to engage with the back and forth over who Charlie Kirk was and what his legacy will be, at least in part because we’re taping this on Saturday, his funeral hasn’t even taken place yet.

What I will say is, a person getting shot is tragic, and a person get shot for their ideas is horrifying.

That is true… No matter what those ideas are, and I also recognize that for many, especially those who were the targets of some of Kirk’s ideas, it has been hard to stay quiet as they see flags lowered to half-staff and hear claims that he debated things “the right way.”

But setting all of that aside, it does seem like some are now willing to weaponize Kirk’s death to do things they’ve been wanting to do for years, whether it’s going after liberal groups, trans people, or their remaining critics in the media. And under some shamelessly flimsy pretext.

All of which brings us back to… Jimmy Kimmel.

Did you catch what was missing? As many astute observers have noted, a great amount of the whitewashing discourse around Kirk has omitted literally anything Kirk ever said.

Ta-Nehisi Coates called out one of the exemplars of the Charlie Kirk retcon — Ezra Klein’s clout-grabbing bid entitled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” — by saying that “for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.”

That same sort of revisionism on steroids has permeated the post-killing media cycle to a maddening degree. I personally agree that prominent figures should be given latitude in the aftermath of their deaths as much as possible.

There are lots of ways to praise Charlie Kirk without saying dumb sh*t like “He never said anything hateful” or other obvious lies. Call him a “warrior,” or a “patriot,” or some watered-down version of the truth like “provocateur.”

But the mass movement to twist Kirk into the pose of just a guy having honest conversations is insulting to the people that Oliver describes as “the targets” of the “ideas” that he then declines to name. And it goes beyond insult to injury when the void of Kirk’s own words is filled by claims that all of Kirk’s ills can be fixed by “context.”

I’m not going to round up the hateful things Kirk said because I already did that, as did Coates, as did outlets like the Guardian. But let me focus on one typical example to illustrate the game Kirk’s fans play with “context.”

Attiah — a Black woman who was fired for posts about Kirk — was the focal point of Kirk fans who zeroed in on a post about his remarks about Black women.

Attiah wrote that Kirk said “Black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot.”

But the “context” argument goes that Kirk was talking about four specific Black women, so that made it all okay. Here’s what Kirk said:

“If we would have said three weeks ago, Blake, if we had said that that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called ‘rrrrrrrr-racist.’

“But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.

“Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

The problem is, Attiah’s version — while technically a misquote as formatted — is a 100 percent accurate characterization of what Kirk said. All of these guys try to take care and give themselves trap doors to get out of owning the horrible things they say, but they often slip up.

While Kirk stuck to specifics in the first part of the quote, he went on to explicitly say that those slots actually belonged to white people.

He didn’t say “other people with greater merit who were white, Black, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, purple, or green,” he said these prominent Black women took a slot that really belonged to a “white person” — an explicit assertion that a “white person” would be inherently superior to these Black women or any other non-white individual.

What are the people Kirk “targeted,” then, to make of Oliver’s failure to interrogate the lies that built up in the 11 days between Kirk’s death and Oliver’s tapping? Surely eleven days is a decent enough interval to (checks notes) accurately quote someone who has died and is being lied about.

There’s a moment later in the show that may or may not explain it, but which is definitely not a good look. After cannily explaining how Trump and his goons don’t actually have to win in court or dole out an actual penalty in order to chill speech, Oliver said this:

JOHN OLIVER: I should say, we are very lucky at this show to be in a different situation. We’re not on broadcast TV. We’re on cable. And our parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, doesn’t own broadcast networks, meaning that we are much less susceptible to pressure from the FCC than, say, ABC’s parent company Disney, or CBS’s parent companies Paramount Skydance.

That is obviously very good news for us. And I really don’t see why that situation should change any time soon.

NEWS CLIP: We are back with what could be a colossal media merger, according to people familiar with the matter. Paramount Skydance is preparing a bid to buy Warner Brothers’ Discovery.

JOHN OLIVER: F–k! f–king sh-t, f–king shit, f–k it!

Okay, so. It was fun while it lasted, guys. Whatever happens next, let me say now, it has been the honor of my life to age like a haunted painting before your very eyes.

Now, I don’t know if that merger was in the back of Oliver’s mind, or if the blizzard of firings and other pressure shunted him away from taking on Kirk’s record, or if it really just was decency that prevented him from including a supercut that would have taken about as long as the “corkscrew penis” gag he belabored.

It was the wrong choice in any case, but whatever the reason, the people Oliver says were “targeted” by Charlie Kirk need to be spoken up for now, more than ever.

Watch above via HBO’s Last Week Tonight.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.